Ashley Au is a Winnipeg-based bassist, composer, sound artist, arranger, music educator, and queer creative. A multifaceted musician, Ashley specializes in the upright and electric basses—performing, touring and recording extensively. As a composer and sound artist, Ashley’s work can be found behind various theatre, opera and dance productions a...

Tenor Keith Klassen has emerged to become one of Canada’s busiest vocal artists. Since graduating with honours from the Opera Division at the University of Toronto in 2002, he has performed over one hundred roles from the standard and new operatic repertoire. He has been engaged across Canada, as well as in Scotland, Ireland, Germany, the United...

Chinese-Canadian composer Roydon Tse creates music that speaks across cultures, drawing from shared human experiences and reflecting on the challenges of climate change, the depths of grief, and the ever-evolving fabric of our world.

In the 2024/2025 season, Roydon’s works were heard internationally, with premieres by the Philadelphia Orchest...

Prokhor, a Russian-born exile, is a composer and conductor living in Toronto. After studying at the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory, he served as Conductor-in-Residence with the Vyatka Symphony Orchestra in his hometown. During that time, he arranged performances of his two major works: a Concerto for violin, piano, and orchestra, and a ballet, ...

Rebecca Gray is a soprano, composer and improviser passionate about performing and creating both classical and contemporary repertoire, always seeking to bring queerness and feminism to everything she does. Rebecca’s creativity, energy and perfect pitch are sought after in the creation of new work, and she has performed with Pacific Opera Victor...

Ramona Luengen (b.1960) is a well-respected Canadian composer, choral conductor and educator. She has composed extensively in the choral genre and her works have been performed by both amateur and professional choirs in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Performances of her music have been broadcast on CBC, BBC, WDR (German...

Kye Marshall is a professional composer, cellist and nature photographer. She combines her love of melody with her facility as a classical and jazz musician and avant-garde improviser to create unique styles of composition.

Improvisation is a critical element in her work. As a composer, she improvises to access and develop musical ideas. As a...

Brian Current’s music has been broadcast in over 35 countries and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barlow Prize (USA), a Premio Fedora (Italy), a Jules Léger Prize and a Selected Work (under 30) at the International Rostrum of Composers. In 2016, he won the inaugural Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music. Brian’s pieces have been programmed by a...

Born in Canada in 1977, William Rowson holds a Doctor of Music degree in composition from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. His composition teachers include Ned Rorem, George Tsontakis, Peter Paul Koprowski and Gary Kulesha.

William Rowsons’s works have been performed by orchestras and ensembles acr...

Sean Ferguson was born in the remote Northern-Alberta community of Fort Vermilion. He has lived in Montreal since 1990, where he studied composition at McGill University. His fascination with the mechanics of perception have led him to carry out extensive research in psychoacoustics and to incorporate these findings into his compositional langua...

David Ogborn is an artist programmer and artist researcher, committed to unfolding the potential for algorithms and computation to be sites of play, curiosity, and collaboration. This work takes the form of solo and ensemble performances of live coding and network music, the development of software to be used by artists, students, teachers, and ...

Katya Pine composes original music for for film, television, stage and concert. Trained at the University of Toronto with postgraduate studies in London, England, Katya is a recipient of the prestigious Floyd Chalmers award.
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Her projects range from Documentaries, Sci-fi, Indie film, and TV to art songs, opera, and more. Katya is passionate a...

Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald, Australia), and lauded for “creating a stir with listeners for her breathless imagination and ability to capture Gen-X and beyond generation” (Winnipeg Free Press), award-winning composer and video artist composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an...

Juliet Palmer’s music has come to life under a highway off-ramp, in a swimming pool, in the plastic flotsam of a remote beach, and in concert halls across North America, Europe, and Oceania. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Juliet makes her home in Toronto where she is artistic director of Urbanvessel, a platform for interdisciplinary colla...

A native of Saltspring Island, British Columbia, Craig Galbraith is one of Canada's exciting young composers. He has won awards including the Karen Keiser Prize in Canadian New Music and first prize in SOCAN’s Hugh Le Caine Award for an electroacoustic work, Silhouette. He was also a prize winner in CBC’s National Competition for Young Composers...

Composer and librettist Dean Burry is a storyteller. In addition to his extensive work in the opera and concert music fields, he has become one of the world’s leading composers of children’s opera, his works receiving performances across Canada, the United States, Europe, China and Brazil. At over 600 performances, his opera The Brothers Grimm i...

Jana Skarecky is a Canadian contemporary classical composer of vocal and instrumental music – for solo instruments, chamber groups, solo voice, choir, and orchestra.

Jana was born in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on November 11, 1957. She came to Canada with her family in 1968. In 1980 she received a Bachelor of Music degree in Honours Compo...

Based in San Francisco, composer Aaron Gervais works with ensembles and presenters across North America and Europe. He is particularly interested in humour, found materials, quotation/collage, and the sociological aspects of how people use music. As such, Aaron’s output ranges from the introspectively sombre to the irreverently slapstick, and cr...

Composer Abigail Richardson-Schulte was born in Oxford, England, and moved to Canada as a child. Ironically, she was diagnosed incurably deaf at 5. Upon moving to Calgary, however, her hearing was fully intact within months. Her music has been commissioned and performed by major orchestras, presenters, music festivals, and broadcasters, includin...

Fucked Up have had one of the most unpredictable career arcs of any band of this century, let alone any course run by a scrappy hardcore outfit from Toronto. What started as a ragtag group of people learning their instruments together and releasing searingly confrontational seven-inch singles, quickly expanded to something much bigger as soon as...

Fucked Up have had one of the most unpredictable career arcs of any band of this century, let alone any course run by a scrappy hardcore outfit from Toronto. What started as a ragtag group of people learning their instruments together and releasing searingly confrontational seven-inch singles, quickly expanded to something much bigger as soon as...

John Harris is a composer and Artistic Director of the Red Note Ensemble. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Oxford, where he was Organ Scholar at Trinity College, and he took his Master’s degree in composition at the RSAMD in Glasgow. He has extensive experience as a composer for film and theatre, including the Edinburgh Interna...

Benjamin Pesetsky is a composer and writer. His music has been performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra, New England Conservatory’s Jordan Winds, Tapestry Opera in Toronto, WordSong and the Shakespeare Concerts in Boston, and Guerrilla Composers Guild and the Phonochrome Collective in San Francisco. Current pro...

Omar Daniel has composed extensively in solo, chamber, electronic and orchestral idioms, and was the 1997 recipient of the Jules Lèger Award for New Chamber Music. Other composition awards include the 2007 K.M. Hunter Arts Award, the SOCAN National Competition for Young Composers and the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers. He has...

Darren J — born in 1984 and from Montréal — does not write autobiographical texts using the third person. I studied music composition and theory at McGill University, completing my bachelor’s in 2011 and master’s in 2014 under the supervision of Chris Paul Harman and Denys Bouliane. During that time, I was awarded several composer-in-residencie...

Twice winner of the Juno Award for Best Classical Composition, Chan Ka Nin’s works have been performed by ensembles and artists such as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, National Arts Orchestra, CBC Vancouver Orchestra, Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra London C...

Originally from Cracow, Poland, Norbert Palej has been recognized for his “first-rate and genuinely original work” (American Composers Orchestra), and a musical language that generates “visceral excitement” (The Boston Globe). “Palej eclipses Lutoslawski,” writes Montreal’s La Presse, while The Gazette calls his work “riveting” and Musical Toron...

A two-time Canadian Screen Award winner and International Film Music Critics Association Award nominee with over 100 composition credits to his name, Darren Fung is a highly influential composer who is well-respected in the TV and Film scoring worlds. His work on Niobe Thompson’s The Great Human Odyssey and Equus: Story of the Horse has received...

Born 1950 in Los Angeles, 'Dick' started playing guitar in Fullerton, the home of Fender Guitars, at age 10. He began performing popular music at age twelve, moving through folk, surf, rock, R&B, blues and soul bands. He began writing songs for his group Northern Sound, recording two singles in ’64 and ’65. Richard picked up double bass in h...

Dr Afarin Mansouri is an award-winning composer and musicologist whose works have been performed in Canada, the United States, England, Iran, and South America. She is the recipient of many awards including a Canada 150 Medal for her artistic contribution, and a nomination for the Louise Applebaum Composition Award for Young Audience. Afarin has...

Rene Orth is a composer that “breaks new ground” (Opera News), writing music described as “…always dramatic, reflective, rarely predictable, and often electronic” (Musical America). Her music focuses on dramatic and lyrical storytelling, and she takes a keen interest in blending electronic soundscapes with acoustic music. She recently completed ...

Linda Catlin Smith grew up in New York and lives in Toronto. She studied music in NY and at the University of Victoria (Canada). Her music has been performed and/or recorded by: BBC Scottish Orchestra, Exaudi, Tafelmusik, Other Minds Festival, California Ear Unit, Kitchener-Waterloo, Victoria and Vancouver Symphonies, Arraymusic, Tapestry New Op...

Stephen Andrew Taylor composes music that explores boundaries between art and science. His first orchestra commission, Unapproachable Light, inspired by images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the New Testament, was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 1996 in Carnegie Hall. Other works include the chamber quartet Quark Shadows, c...

Rodney Sharman teaches composition at the VSO School of Music. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Early Music Vancouver’s “New Music for Old Instruments," the Victoria Symphony, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and Composer-Host of the Calgary Philharmonic’s New Music Festival, "Hear and Now." In addition to co...

Originally from Northern Ireland, Gareth Williams is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art. His compositions seek to find new participants, collaborators and audiences for new opera and music theatre, to shed light on stories and communities that have been overlooked, and to explore ideas of vulnerability in vocal writing.

William...

From scoring films, to researching rap, to running a concert series dedicated to new Canadian music, to hauling percussion around southern Ontario, to helping an entire class of students collectively compose a piece for symphony orchestra, composer August Murphy-King has worn a wide array of hats throughout his musical career.

After honing hi...

Toronto composer James Rolfe has been commissioned and performed by ensembles, orchestras, choirs, theatres, and dance and opera companies in Canada, the USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the K. M. Hunter Music Award, the Louis Applebaum Composers Award, the Jules Léger Priz...

Christiaan’s love of music began at an early age and has been a part of his life since he can remember. His goal is to write expressive and uplifting music that excites both audience and performers.

Christiaan received his Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Calgary (2005) where he studied composition and clarinet. His com...

Kevin Morse is a composer based in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Mount Allison University. His diverse portfolio includes solo, vocal, and chamber music, several short operas, and works for orchestra. In addition, he has created audio installations and works that incorporate el...

Described as a “new music visionary” (National Arts Centre), composer Andrew Staniland has established himself as one of Canada’s most important and innovative musical voices. His music is performed and broadcast internationally and has been described by Alex Ross in the New Yorker Magazine as “alternately beautiful and terrifying.” Important ac...

Iman Habibi, D.M.A. (University of Michigan), is an Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist, and a founding member of the piano duo ensemble Piano Pinnacle.

Hailed as “a giant in talent” (the Penticton Herald), “whose technical mastery is matched by his musical and cultural literacy” (Hudson-Housatonic Arts), Iman has been commissioned by The B...

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Ivan Barbotin began playing guitar at 10. Within a couple of years, he formed the rock band Sphinx which soon won the “Soviet Union’s Best Youth Band” competition. At 16, he joined Russia’s celebrated rock band Forum as lead guitarist, where he was half the age of the other musicians. With Forum he toured the coun...

The music of composer Benton Roark (he/him) has been described as “visionary” (The Vancouver Sun), “ardent and soaring” (The National Post), and “an experience of deep and darkling beauty” (The Austin Chronicle). In recent years much of his work has focused on new opera, with full productions including Tapestry Opera’s Tap:Ex Augmented Opera (“g...

Chris is a composer & arts educator. Chris writes chamber and orchestral works, film-score, and opera. He is also an arts educator, bringing the voices of young people into focus through collaborative creation of new operas and instrumental works.

His music has been described as “urgent, masterful” (NOW Magazine), and “powerfully virtuosi...